Indiahas the world’s youngest internet population with 75% of all users under the age of 35 years, according to co-founder and executive chairman of comScore.

Delivering his keynote presentation at ad:tech New Delhi 2012, the second edition of the world’s leading digital marketing event in India he said that in comparison, only 52% of the world’s and 55% of Asia Pacific region’s population is under 35. Further, a third of India’s total online population is between 15 to 24 years. Indian users spent a total of 34.47 billion minutes online last year, which translated to over half a billion hours.

Another interesting take away from the session was that today, with close to 1.2 billion users, social networking globally has become the size of the Indian population. Social networking has been growing at a much faster rate of 174% compared to internet growing at 88% in terms of total unique users. Here too, India leads ahead of the world average. In India, social networking has reach among 95% of total online user base, compared to 82% of the world’s online users leveraging social networks. Three out of four minutes spent on social network are on Facebook. LinkedIn reaches 1 in 8 online users, whereas 1 in 12 online users are on Twitter in India. In contrast, use of email and instant messaging is on a decline especially in the younger age groups. Email usage declined by 22% in the 15-24 age segment, and by 8% among 25-34 age segment.

Rammohan Sundaram, Event Chairman and Founder, CEO & Managing Director, Networkplay Media Pvt Ltd., said, “Gian’s keynote was an eye opener as well as an alarm bell for CMOs. With US no longer remaining the centre of the online world, and with Asia Pacific commanding almost half the world’s online population, marketers who do not have digital as a core component of their brand strategy yet are bound to lose out in the race. So many of the exhibitors at ad:tech New Delhi this year are already showcasing technologies that we were only talking about at last year’s conference. These technologies are no longer in the sandbox, but are proven successfully, and early adopters will stand to get much ahead in the race for customer engagement.” We heard PepsiCo’s global digital head, Shiv Singh, talk about the real-time marketing imperative, while others like Anurag Mehrotra of Ford India shared examples of how they engaging customers with rich-content apps and other digital experiences, added Ram.

Gian Fulgoni said that now there are measures to track valid impressions on online advertising. In one of the studies, comScore found that only 69% of the total display ad impressions were seen by users online. Due to the growing complexity of digital advertising ecosystem, there was a need to develop a ‘single tag’ solution that helps cut the cost of doing business and bolsters confidence in actually visible ads that are delivered.